Michele Hutchison, Author at Finding Dutchland

My Dutch Life: Maaike Koning

9 Dec

9 December 2016

Maaike Koning is a Dutch photographer living in Amsterdam with her partner, a photo editor, and their two children, Sam and Sverre, aged twelve and nine. She loves to be outside: biking, gardening and hiking, and enjoys visiting museums and collecting photography books. The entire family travelled through Australia for four months a couple of years ago. She is currently working on several assignments for design and communication agencies and researching a new portrait series.

How long have you been a photographer?

I started studying photographic design at the art college (KABK) in The Hague in 1995 and graduated in 1999. So somewhere in between, I probably ‘became’ a photographer. I got my first job just after I’d graduated. My boyfriend and I took pictures of the kitchen staff for a restaurant guide to London and Amsterdam. We had a great time enjoying all the free food we got in those restaurants.

Was it difficult to find work at first?

Difficult but not impossible. I was really eager to make money out of it… I was lucky enough to get a scholarship (startstipendium) in the year I graduated, so I had time to work on a nice portfolio and buy a good camera. It made things easier. My graduation project was a book about different phases of women’s lives. Making a book was unusual in the pre-digital period. I sold quite a lot of books to design agencies, which meant they did not forget my work and remembered me when they had a suitable assignment. I also joined a photographers’ agency in my first year. But still, the first eight years were off and on, with either having lots of jobs and being incredibly busy, or looking for jobs for months. The last eight years, I have worked for clients who give me enough space for my own style. I also published a book about people and places in Amsterdam Noord. It reflects the identity of this part of Amsterdam, long known as an underprivileged area. Below is a picture from the book. Mr and Mrs De Vries have been married for seventy years, have always lived in Noord and experienced the severe flooding in Oostzaan in 1960 when they witnessed their home-made furniture floating out of the house.

Have you been influenced by any other Dutch photographers?

There are so many fantastic talents, not only in Holland. I did my internship with photographer and director Yani. He inspired me a lot. His playful approach to assignments is enviable. Bertien van Manen is one of my favourite documentary photographers. I love the book she made about Russia: A Hundred Summers, A Hundred Winters.

Ed van de Elsken is pretty unique and great. He is one of the documentary photographers who shows that you don’t need to go far away to make great series. Alec Soth, an American photographer, is one of my favourites these days. I love his style and light and the subjects he chooses.

What do you think makes a good photographer?

Difficult… It can be many things. First I would say it’s quite crucial that a photographer develops a style that makes him or her identifiable and recognizable. (This is also important for clients.) Photographers that know what they are doing and why. The photography I love is where the use of daylight is stunning without claiming the entire picture and where the people or animals or moment intrigue me. Then, there is always one very important thing: how people react to the photographer. It all has to do with ‘taste’ and it’s great if it feels like the perfect expression or moment. This does not necessarily mean the sitter has to think it’s a great picture of him or her, but it usually means the viewer is intrigued by the picture, because of something in the picture.

Dutch photographers, artists and architects are all famous for being good with light? Is the light special here? Or is the lack of light in the winter a reason to seek it out and cherish it?

Some people say the beautiful light has to do with the reflection of the sea in the clouds, which makes the light great in a big part of Holland, and also because of the ‘flatness’. I don’t really know. I do know it can be a real challenge. Winters are dark, you really have to search for the light sometimes, but when there’s a sunny day, the light can be awesome. In summer, there is totally different light, so Dutch photographers are experienced in lots of different types of light.

You lived in Australia for a while, would you rather live somewhere other than Holland?

For a long period, I thought I could live in Australia. I lived there for a year when I was younger. I love the wild nature and the infinite space. But when we travelled there with the kids, it felt too far away from home for the long term and the space and hot climate was too much for a daily life. I also realized it was too late for the kids to move. We love our life in Amsterdam far too much to move away for a long time. It gave me peace of mind to realize this.

The trip was great. We did a lot of wild camping, fishing, hiking, we stayed at an aboriginal farm for a while. The kids learned a lot. They shared some of their adventures with their classmates on a blog.

What’s your experience of raising children here? Does it mirror your own childhood or are you doing things differently?

Holland is great for raising kids. It’s quite safe and you can find anything you want for them. My childhood was a bit more free than what I can give my own kids in Amsterdam and I think I grew up a bit more independent than them. I grew up on the edge of a small village. Our large garden bordered a wood in which I’d go on daily expeditions with my brother or friends. We’d build huts, run around, jump over ditches and hide in an empty house. We all cycled alone to school, in my case from the age of seven.

When our daughter was born, we were living in Amsterdam West in a third-floor apartment. I wanted a house with a garden before she could walk, or at least a few trees and a lawn, so that Sam could go on mini-expeditions like the ones I’d been on, without me always having to be there. We found the right house in Amsterdam Noord. Now that the children are older, their ‘territory’ has expanded to fields, woods, and cycle and walking paths in the area. I think it’s important for them to go on expeditions alone. I want them to make their own decisions and, most importantly, have a lot of fun, without their parents hovering over them. Maybe that’s something typically Dutch, letting your children off the leash. In the end it’s also really handy for parents when their children are independent.

What are the main challenges of raising kids in Holland?

I think the pitfalls can be found in social pressure. For a while, it was a trend to send your children to a crèche for four days a week. I really had to defend myself for choosing not to do that. The children went to a host mother (gastouder) two days a week and for the rest of the time we were either at home or the grandparents helped out. Having less money as a result can also be a choice. Anyway, when your children go to school, there’s more time for work again.

The same goes for all the things your kids do outside school, like music, sports and their swimming diploma. In the Netherlands, parents start with those things very early. I wonder whether it’s really the right thing for every child and I think it’s better to wait until they discover their own interests. I find the school days long enough, certainly for young children.

What you do have in Amsterdam is a lot of choice in terms of education. It’s great that everything is possible, but in total that makes a lot of choices and it can be quite overwhelming. It’s nice if parents are able to choose a path that suits their children, without taking too much notice of what everyone else thinks.

All photos (c) Maaike Koning, 2016

The Art of Crafting Dutch Surprises

1 Dec

1 December 2016

By Michele Hutchison

One of the skills I never thought I’d need so much as a wannabee Dutch parent is crafting. Growing up in England in the seventies and eighties, I did plenty of arts and crafts stuff as a kid. My mother went through a hippy phase of teaching me and my brother to collect, spin and weave wool (she still has the spinning wheel at home), to craft corn-dollies out of straw (truly hideous things which attracted mites!) and to sew and knit. At school, we made arts and crafts projects out of toilet rolls and crepe paper. But I never expected these crazy skillz to equip me for my kid’s childhood in the new century.
Glue and coloured paper and crappy-looking creations are a major part of Dutch day-care and primary school. Both the Dutch childminders we have had, have spent the majority of their time knutselen – a handy Dutch verb for doing craftwork – with the kids too. And they’ve loved it. They’ve done more than I ever did as a kid, despite my seventies-style mum. My daughter is currently a big fan of origami and can spend hours in the kitchen making little birds. It’s got to be preferable to spending hours on the iPad (her other main ‘hobby’).

The parenting crafting challenge comes in the autumn in Holland. First there’s St Maarten’s Day on 11th November which requires a home-made lantern. (St Maarten, patron saint of Utrecht and Groningen – aka Saint Martin of Tours – was a Hungarian-born bishop who famously donated half of his cloak to a beggar.) The children go from door to door, singing songs as they hold their paper lanterns aloft, and collecting sweets. The lanterns are relatively easy to make and don’t require much adult intervention, thank God. Here’s what Ina made on her own this year.

The real test is Sinterklaas (celebrated on 5th December) when children draw lots at school to see who will make a ‘surprise’ for a fellow classmate. A surprise is basically a fantasy holder for a hidden gift (worth no more than €3,50 according to the brief). But if you’d never seen one, your eyes would pop out at the array of expert-looking DIY animals, computers, play stations, sports paraphernalia et al displayed in the class on the day the surprises get handed it. To a foreign parent, it is a truly daunting sight. How the hell do the kids make these things? And how the hell do their parents know how to help them? Checking out Pinterest will give you an idea of the skill and complexity I’m talking about.

The first year I just let my son wing it on his own. He made a cardboard climbing wall covered in little modelling clay penguins that looked really cute to me, but somehow didn’t fit in with what the other kids had made. It wasn’t “boxy” enough, a fellow parent tipped me off. The next year he made a cardboard guitar and then it was my daughter’s turn. A skipping rope with massive handles fashioned out of papier-mâché covered balloons and toilet rolls and then painted, looked pretty credible. The gift was hidden in one of the handles. Last year she made a house and a garden on top of a cardboard box base and the girl who she gave it to couldn’t hide her disappointment. “You can always tell which kids have foreign parents,” I heard one mum murmur. I’d finally found the one area of parenting where Dutch parents seemed a little competitive.

And so this year, in her last year of primary school, Ina is determined to ‘win’ at surprise-making. It’s her last chance to make a splash and so it’s been all hands on deck. She decided to make a life-sized dog with a football out of chicken wire and papier-mâché. The gift would be hidden inside the ball. I spent an entire day consulting Dutch parents, googling and purchasing chicken wire, tape and wallpaper paste. At the weekend, we put on our gloves and attempted to bend bits of wire into the shape of a dog, based on a drawing of a friendly-looking dog Ina had found online. It took hours and was one of the most difficult things I’d ever attempted in my life (in craft terms). Just getting the dog to stand on all four legs took us about an hour and a half.

Trying to ignore the fact that it looked like a pig with a long tail, we covered the frame in papier-mâché and left it to dry – which took three days, there was so much glue! (We always do this kind of stuff in the bathroom to make clearing up easier). Then Ina painted everything with acrylic paints and this is the result. It’s not too bad but will her classmate like it? And will anyone comment on her non-Dutch mum?

Getting to Grips with Dutch Grades

23 Nov

23 November 2016

By Michele Hutchison

Of all the things expat parents have to get used to in the Netherlands, coming to terms with the bizarre Dutch grading system is one of the toughest. Especially because of the tendency all of us Anglos have to convert what look like marks out of ten into percentages.

First of all, the two systems don’t align at all, and second, it’s harder to get a basic pass grade in Holland than in the US or UK. Third, it’s actually pretty rare to get the equivalent of an A here. So those of us expat parents who have grown up in a culture of As and A+s are in for a shock. (Incidentally, Dutch kids applying for foreign university places can also suffer from the same mental error when those universities try to convert 6s into Cs, 7s into Bs and 8s into As.)

I’ll try to explain the basics first and if I get this right, you’ll realize that Dutch people famously ‘settling’ for a passing grade (6) isn’t what it looks like at all.

A 6 is a voldoende – satisfactory. Anything lower is an onvoldoende – unsatisfactory (note the term ‘fail’ isn’t used; also, a 5.5 average can also counts as a pass because of a loophole – anything above a half is rounded up to the next full figure at the end of the year). A 7 is good, and an 8 is very good. Anything higher than an eight is still very good, the highest is a ten, but no distinction is made between an 8, 9 or a 10 since getting an 8 already is considered achievement enough.

Now here’s the catch. A 6 isn’t a 6/10. It doesn’t mean your child got 6 questions right and 4 questions wrong. For tests, the teachers usually deduct points (or half-points) for errors from a starting score of 10, rather than adding up questions answered correctly. Emrys, who teaches English HAVO/VWO at a Rotterdam secondary school explains:

“Dutch grading is a complicated thing. Most teachers tell their pupils how many mistakes equals a point off. How many it is depends on the length of the test. Our English department tries to calculate the grade on smaller tests so that a 6 is equal to about 80% correct. On larger tests we usually strive for 70-75% is equal to a six.

When grading essays or letters or other assignments, we usually work with a correction form adding up to a certain amount of points. On a writing assignment I just corrected, the students could earn 14 points. So 14 points was a 10, 13 a 9, 12 a 8 and so on.”

So 80%, an English or American A, could equal a basic pass in the Dutch grading system. If your child is coming home with 6s, he or she is already doing very well indeed by foreign standards! My son has repeatedly told me how strict the marking system is – you should see my face drop when he gets a 5 or a 6 – I should really listen to him.For a bit more information, I talked to a Dutch friend Heidi, who has taught across all the different types of secondary school levels from VMBO to VWO. The first point she made is that there is no national curriculum in the Netherlands and there are no agreements between schools about grading. What they do have is kerndoelen – key objectives which should be taught in the lessons. The same applies to primary and secondary education. Usually there are agreements within a school about standards and norms and how much certain tests count towards a final score. She also explained that different types of tests are differently weighted and the tests where students simply have to reproduce information are marked more stringently than those which require interpretation and application of what they have learned.

N.B. Rina and I wrote The Happiest Kids in the World based on our own experiences of raising our children here. My son’s first couple of months of secondary school are covered in the last chapter, but I didn’t have enough experience to write much about grades (there hadn’t even been any at our primary school).

Dutchness and Flemishness at the Frankfurt Book Fair

28 Oct

28 October 2016

By Michele Hutchison

One of the things that worried me from the outset when we were writing THE HAPPIEST KIDS IN THE WORLD was the need to generalize. In order to discuss Dutch parenting culture it was necessary to find things we felt the majority of Dutch parents did, even though there were obvious exceptions. You see, not all Dutch people are happy to let their kids play unsupervised outside from a young age; not all Dutch people are immune to the temptation to push their kids to get high grades. And not all Brits and Americans are helicopter parents trying to teach their coddled toddlers to read and write. There will be plenty of readers who point this out to us, I’m sure. But in order to put together an argument and create discussion, generalisation is a necessary evil. Having studied Comp Lit at university, an approach that picks out key features in national literature and then compares them with others’, comparison is now part of my intellectual make-up and I love trying to make out the big picture.

Last week I was on stage at the Frankfurt Book Fair* discussing the differences between Flemish and Dutch literature with Words Without Borders editor Susan Harris and top Flemish writer, Annelies Verbeke. This was after I’d edited a Flemish feature for the literary magazine and attempted to explain what attracted me to those Belgian-Dutch writers and why the regular Dutch were a bit more boring sometimes. Of course, Annelies Verbeke had her own perfectly valid views – Flemish literature is incredibly diverse and includes writers from many different backgrounds, as does Dutch. In fact it’s important to look at the similarities too, especially given the slogan the Dutch and Flemish had chosen to present themselves under – THIS IS WHAT WE SHARE – as joint guests of honour.

Being guest of honour at Frankfurt is a pretty big thing in terms of cultural exposure. It meant a delegation of seventy writers (several of whom I have translated or will be translating – yay!). The Dutch and Flemish were super proud since it also meant a massive increase in book translations into German in the run-up to the fair, which will open up access to other languages. There was an opening ceremony with both kings and plenty of press coverage. Holland and Flanders also had an exhibition space in which they could market their culture. They opted for a large wrap-around canvas with a projection of a seascape (the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany share the North Sea coast) and an array of deck chairs. White plastic, sound-insulating, crate-like partitions created smaller spaces which contained a book shop, a comics & graphic novels live production area and a theatre for the lively readings, interviews and performances. So the joint guests of honour presented themselves as quiet, calm, thoughtful, design-oriented, occasionally shouty and with a beating heart of graphic culture. If I’m to be allowed to generalize.

*Frankfurt, a word often on a publisher’s lips, but a difficult concept to grasp for anyone who has never been there. Each year the Messe in Frankfurt opens its doors to the world’s largest book fair and probably the oldest, since it dates back to 500 years ago when Gutenberg developed the printing press in nearby Mainz. With more than 7,000 exhibitors and around 277,000 visitors, it forms a high point in the international publishing calendar in terms of the buying and selling of foreign rights. It is particularly intriguing to writers who are not usually welcome.

** With thanks to the Frankfurt Buchmesse Business Club which invited me to attend as an Ambassador. The Business Club was a chilled out place to take meetings, listen to presentations and get lunch without long queues.

How We Became a Writing Duo

26 Oct

26 October 2016

By Michele Hutchison

I’ve just removed the card from Restaurant Moto in Utrecht from my wallet. I glanced to the right when walking down the Drieharingstraat the other night and noticed with a pang that it had gone. In February 2015, I’d visited the Japanese restaurant for the first time on a blind date with Rina. But my behind-the-scenes story goes way back, to 2002 when I’d just started working as a commissioning editor at Doubleday publishing house in London. It was a job I would keep for just two years, until 2004, when thirty-seven weeks pregnant with my son Benjamin, I moved to Amsterdam.

Working at Doubleday was like stepping into a warm bath. Tucked away in Ealing, it was far from the buzz of Soho, the Strand and Covent Garden, where many other publishers are based. Transworld – the group Doubleday belongs to – prided itself on its friendly atmosphere. Workers were part of a large family with gentle father figure Larry Finlay at its head. Larry was the kind of person who would give you unsolicited advice on breastfeeding, keenly in touch with his feminine side. Marianne Velmans, my direct boss, was also a nurturing, guiding presence, eager to help her young editors make their way to the top of the business. It was the kind of place people joined and never left, there was very low staff turnover. And unusual for the cut-throat atmosphere of London companies, it was understanding of family commitments; many mothers and fathers were able to juggle parenthood and careers there.

I too imaged myself tucked away in Ealing commissioning and editing wonderful books for a great many years to come. But life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. I married a Dutchman and ended up in Amsterdam on maternity leave. And though I was planning to return to my fabulous job in London, the advantages of bringing up kids in Holland got in the way. I ended up finding a job in Dutch publishing and it wasn’t until a merger had me commuting for 2.5 hours a day that I decided to go freelance. I’d been translating Dutch books on the side for some years and now I made this my sole business. Translation would be my career. It was similar to editing but even more engrossing, since you’d spend not weeks but months working closely on a text.

Until I got a phone call from my old boss Marianne. Might I be interested in co-writing a book on why Dutch children were the happiest in the world? She already had one writer, an American expat with a young son, but she wanted someone to write about older kids and add a British perspective to the mix. She’d thought of me because she knew I’d stayed in Amsterdam precisely because of the advantages of bringing up children here, and I had plenty of experience of working closely with authors in an editorial role. Perhaps I could bring both skills to bear.

“Behind the Scenes of The Happiest Kids in the World” are blog posts that give readers a sneak peak in the making of our forthcoming book The Happiest Kids in The World.

Next time: Rina’s account of what happened in the Japanese restaurant…

P.S. Can’t wait to get your hands on the book and you currently live in Europe? Pre-order here. If you happen to live in the United States, you can get your copy here.

Why I Love Dutch Children’s Films

20 Sep

20 September 2016

By Michele Hutchison

My nine-year-old daughter used to watch noisy cartoons, progressing from Dora the Explorer to Pokemon and Ben 10, and watching all the Disney and Pixar hits on the way. But about a year ago there was a sea change in her viewing. She discovered serialised Dutch children’s book adaptations such as Koen Kampioen (about a young footballer), De Leeuwenkuil (about a family running a zoo) and Hoe overleef ik (about an adolescent girl). Then she moved on to the wealth of Dutch children’s films shown during the ‘Zappbios’ slot on national tv. For the first time, I started eagerly joining her in front of the telly.

Dutch cinema tends to be realist and naturalistic; films frequently deal with family and friendship issues, tackling loyalty, betrayal, failed ambitions. While this can make for dull and rather monotonous adult films with a lack of dramatic action, Dutch children’s cinema is often outstanding. The young leads act well (by this I mean subtly) and the issues treated work well within the context of childhood, growing up and learning about how the world works. For example, we recently watched the Emmy-award winning lightly comic Rhubarb about a step-brother and sister who try to fix their parents’ failing second marriage. Interestingly, relatively few of the films contain fantasy elements – examples are Dolfje (‘Alfie the Werewolf’ about a boy who becomes a werewolf on his 7th birthday) and Dummie the Mummy (about an Egyptian child mummy that turns up in a Dutch village), but even these also feature regular children in a realist setting.

I have a hunch that Dutch films are easy to relate to because they feature actual children as opposed to fantasy adults or animals. I’m hard-pushed to think of many Hollywood films with human kids in: Home Alone, ET, Back to the Future all hark back to the 80s, and then there are the more recent Roald Dahl adaptations, of course, but still. It’s almost as if superheroes, princesses and animals have to stand in for children most of the time. The sad reason might have something to do with the lack of freedom American children have while growing up. What makes the plots and premises of the Dutch films possible is the fact that Dutch children are free to play outdoors for hours on end in real life. The young characters portrayed in the films move around without parental supervision. They play outdoors, going off on little adventures in the way the Famous Five and Secret Seven did in the Enid Blyton books I read as a child. They have their own (head)space in which the dramatic action can take place. They aren’t followed about by hovering parents.

The other difference is that Dutch parents don’t protect their children from learning about the more challenging aspects of life. They don’t grow up in a rose-coloured bubble, shielded from knowledge of illness, death or sex. Life is not censored. The last Zappbios we watched was actually a German film called Köpfuber (Upside Down). It is about a ten year-old boy losing his joie de vivre as a side effect of ADHD medication. It was hard-hitting rather than a feel-good movie but definitely food for thought. Allowing children to watch Dutch and other European arthouse-style movies prepares them for the real world in a way that no Disney film can.

Here are my daughter’s favourite Dutch films:

Achtste-Groepers Huilen Niet / Cool Kids Don’t Cry

A 12-year-old gets leukemia in the last year of primary school. I think this struck a particular chord because one of my daughter’s close friends was suffering from cancer at the time.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LvdPO07b60

Kauwboy / Crow-boy

A boy and a crow and a violent father, it reminds me of the Ken Loach’s Kes.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2arjDF3hmo

De Boskampis / The Boskampis

A comedy about a boy who pretends his dorky father is a Mafia boss.

Trailer: https://vimeo.com/120481247

Mees Kees / Class of Fun

A trainee teacher gets put in front of the class. Comedy.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRragbB5npg

Het Paard van Sinterklaas / St Nicholas’s Horse

Perennial classic about a young Chinese girl hoping for a gift in her shoe.

Trailer (no subtitles): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MTdLL08Yds

In Oranje / In Orange

Film about a boy who dreams of playing for the Dutch football team and loses his father to a heart attack.

Trailer (no subtitles): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXUXi9IkwPo

Het Zakmes / The Pen Knife

Cute 1992 film about a six year-old trying to return a penknife to a friend who has moved away.

No trailer but here is an except: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPz8cvTYjCw

De Sterkste Man van Nederland / The Strongest Man in Holland

A single mum tells her son that his father was the strongest man in the Netherlands. He goes off in search.

Trailer (no subtitles): https://www.filmtotaal.nl/film/19940

Minoes / The Cat That Came In From The Roof

Film of Annie MG Schmidt’s classic children’s book about a young woman who can turn into a cat

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EO8-iDYffdE

Kruistocht in Spijkerbroek / Crusade in Jeans

Another film of a classic children’s book, a boy goes back to 13th century to set a few things right.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uc0aM6Wtr_s

The Grammar School Debate From the Outside

13 Sep

13 September 2016

By Michele Hutchison

‘For far too many children in Britain, the chance they have in life is determined by where they live, or how much money their parents have,’ Theresa May said last week, referring to the in-built inequities in the British school system. There is a gaping chasm between the quality of state schooling available in the south and what you can get in the rest of the country. And then there are the public (private) schools which are better than any of these anyway (though she doesn’t say that). You’re either rich or you’re f*cked in the UK is how many parents see it. Reform would be welcome to most.

But May’s first speech as Prime Minister promising plans for new grammar schools is causing a furore. ‘Theresa May entrenches segregation and privilege with her education reforms’, was one such headline. ‘We will fail as a nation if we only get the top 15 per cent to 20 per cent of our children achieving well,’ Sir Michael Wilshaw, Chief Inspector of Schools, declared on Radio 4, underlining the typically Anglo-Saxon ambition for all children to achieve great A levels.

What’s the problem with grammar schools then? In the Guardian, Sam Freedman argues that only a tiny minority of children from disadvantaged backgrounds actually attend these schools and, really they cater for the middle classes. (Hang on: what’s wrong with the middle classes? They can’t always afford private school fees either.) He goes on to state that ‘all the top education systems in the world are comprehensive,’ which is where I get all bristly. It’s patently untrue when you consider the Netherlands which does have a selective system and scores excellently in the OECD report he himself quotes from.

The Dutch system is a great improvement on the British one and it’s one of the main attractions of life here as a parent. Born into the non-affluent middle class, I attended a small-town grammar school in the Midlands myself. It wasn’t all it was cooked up to be, as I later found out when I went to uni. The privately-educated kids were way ahead academically and it took me a couple of terms to catch up. So as I see it, if you want the best education in the UK right now you have to pay for it, grammar schools or not. The Netherlands on the other hand, has a unified school system, paid for by high taxation. You don’t need to be rich to attend the top schools.

Dutch children attend primary school from 4 to 11 years of age and are streamed into different types of secondary schools after that. I’ll explain but bear with me, it’s complicated. There are grammar schools – ‘gymnasiums’ – which provide an academic education (VWO) including Latin and Greek in preparation for university entrance. There are mixed schools which offer the academic stream (VWO) and the professional stream (HAVO – preparation for higher non-academic education). There are schools offering just HAVO. And there are schools providing the various types of vocational education (VMBO). That’s not all though. If you want more mobility, there are large schools that offer all of the education types, the equivalent to the British comprehensives. Children are divided into these streams around the age of 12, after aptitude tests throughout primary school, and character assessment. If a child isn’t interested in knuckling down to bucketloads of Latin and Greek, they won’t be recommended for a gymnasium. You don’t want to set them up to fail. Children who do better than expected can move up a stream.

‘Achievement’, ‘academic’ and ‘meritocracy’ seem to be the catchwords of the grammar school debate. ‘In a true meritocracy, we should not be apologetic about stretching the most academically able to the very highest standards of excellence,’ May says. ‘Every child should be given the opportunity to develop the crucial academic core.’ Everyone must achieve is the subtext and academic studies are preferable to any other kind. But it’s not like that in Holland. The Dutch school system aims to keep pupils engaged and happy and as a result achieves high attendance figures and good pass records. Although the upper middle classes can get hung up about getting their kids into gymnasiums, in general, there is no shame in going to the HAVO or attending a vocational school. The point is, the other schools provide a good education too! There’s a vocational school a couple of hundred yards from my house that teaches plant and animal science. It’s got its own greenhouses and mini-farm out the back. My son and I often peer over the fence in envy at kids grooming ponies and planting bulbs.

The thing is, the British have become trapped in their own ideology – a utopian desire to believe that a meritocratic society might be possible, while having one of the most entrenched class systems in the world. Surely the point should not just be to build more grammar schools, but to provide a better range of education across the board and do away with the socially-divisive private school system? This seems to be what May herself wants: ‘Because if the central concern ordinary working class people have is that their children will not enjoy the same opportunities they have had in life, we need to ensure that there is a good school place for every child, and education provision that caters to the individual needs and abilities of every pupil.’ (Though she should certainly add the middle classes to the working classes.) She also makes it clear she doesn’t support the binary system of secondary moderns picking up the slack once grammar schools have taken the pick of the crop, but welcomes a more diverse selection of schools. Come and take a look at the Dutch system, I say. Don’t just build grammar schools but other types of successful schools that kids actually want to go to.

Stuff Dutch People Think Is Dutch

23 Aug

23 August 2016

By Michele Hutchison

I’ve long been a fan of Colleen Geske’s entertaining blog www.StuffDutchPeopleLike.com. Colleen, who is Canadian, has lived in the Netherlands as long as I have and has spent time cataloguing all the peculiarities of the Lowlands. Topics include: ‘Speaking in expressions’, ‘Impossibly steep stairs’, ‘White leggings’ and ‘Borrels’. In 2013, she self-published a book of the same title with 60 of these blog posts. It’s fun and recognizable and I definitely recommend it. Just recently I bought her follow-up book Stuff Dutch People Say, which being a linguist, is right up my street. The Dutch language is riddled with often peculiar idiom (they speak in expressions, after all) and Colleen sets about explaining where some of these things come from, as well as discussing Dutch words that have made their way into the English language (coleslaw – kool-sla, for example).

It’s probably easier for an outsider moving into a particular culture to isolate the things that seem typically Dutch, than for a Dutch person themselves. It’s easy to assume particular behaviours or objects are normal, until a foreigner points them out to you. The same thing happens to me with Englishness sometimes. A Dutch friend pointed out to me last week that fumbling teenage sex at a bus-stop or in the back of a parked car was not something many Dutch people had ever experienced since most of them lost their virginity at home. A more obvious example of cultural difference is English people abroad constantly having to ask for milk to put in their tea (and then: regular milk, please, not coffee creamer!).

All that said, a new book has just come out in which the Dutch have a go at explaining themselves. The Netherlands in 26 Iconic Objects, edited by Wim Brands and Jeroen van Kan and published by Uitgeverij Balans contains 26 short essays each by a different Dutch writer. I confess to having been an insider on the project since I translated two of the essays myself (‘Ice-Skates’ by Maarten t Hart and ‘Biscuit Tin’ by Maartje Wortel). Although many of the objects chosen weren’t invented by the Dutch, their adoption into Dutch culture highlights something about the natural character. In the case of the essays I translated, ice-skates were probably invented in Scandinavia but became particularly useful in a water-filled country that froze over in the winter. Skating on natural ice in a pair of noren is especially Dutch. Us Brits have got biscuit tins too, of course, but we don’t do that thing of offering our guests just a single biscuit. It’s the single biscuit that exemplifies Dutch frugality.

I’d never heard of a Bolknak (Maarten Asscher’s contribution). It turns out to be a Dutch-produced cigar for the bourgeois classes (not something us foreigners associate with the Dutch – where’s that flat society?). But it also fell out of production many years ago. Clogs, bulbs, herring carts, stroopwafels sure, but ecstacy pills? The writer Renee Kelder claims that cargo-bike mums even take them on occasion, as do Dutch people in their sixties. A ‘drugs holiday’ from the straitjacket of Calvinism. And what to think of geraniums which I always associate with the Greek islands myself? According to Bram Bakker, geraniums are a Dutch cipher for old age as it used to be – ‘sitting behind the geraniums’ as the Dutch expression goes. It’s something modern Dutch oldies wouldn’t be seen dead doing, apparently.

Looking in from the Outside: Brexit for Expats

16 Aug

16 August 2016

By Michele Hutchison

I flew to Manchester last weekend for a friend’s tenth wedding anniversary. It was the first time I’d been back since the referendum. The grey-haired Englishwoman sitting next to me on the plane looked at me slightly askance when I said I’d voted for Britain to stay in the EU. ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Well’, I said, ‘I live in Amsterdam. It’s a no-brainer for me. The fact I can live and work there is thanks to the EU. And there are great advantages to living in Holland. The society is less hierarchical and class-driven than the UK. There’s much less of a gap between rich and poor. And it’s the best place in the world to bring up kids. Actually, that’s why I’ve stayed – to put my kids through the Dutch state school system in a place where being happy is more important than being successful,’ I explained.

It had never occurred to her that the EU was a two-way street. Like millions of others, she’d been force-fed a terrifying polemic. Five million Poles, just waiting to get in and plunder the NHS! But the EU isn’t all about foreigners taking advantage of the British welfare state. The 1.2 million British expats living in the EU got something in return. I was taking advantage of the Dutch healthcare and education system. I’ve long benefited from the EU. I spent my gap year working in France. I learnt more than just the language. The French taught me how to dress, what to eat, how to behave in society. They turned me into a European. Three years after that, I returned to France, at Lyon university, thanks to the Erasmus exchange programme which paid for my study costs. And now I’m living in the Netherlands bringing up my happy children. It’s no utopia but the big ideas are in place.

I’ve been putting off writing about Brexit for weeks. The main reason is politics. I’m too much of a pragmatist to enjoy politics. There’s a glaring gap between big ideas and the administration of real-life politics which results in endless bureaucracy and nothing really getting done. Charles Dickens’ Circumlocution Office from Little Dorrit always comes to mind. And yes, that is one of the problems with the European Union – it requires administration. But administration and its accompanying ludicracy is a necessary evil. It’s something separate from the big idea that led to the creation of the European Union in the first place. The EU was created essentially to keep the peace in the wake of the second world war. In this, it has been largely successful. It has also been important in fostering a European identity, in creating unity (albeit flawed).

“We need to find a way to bridge from our closed groups to other closed groups, try to cross the ever widening social divides,” writes Tobias Stone in his thoughtful essay ‘History tells us what will happen next with Brexit and Trump’ I’d thought Britain was becoming more receptive to foreign ideas and cultures: Scandi-crime box sets, French parenting, Danish hygge, translated literature. But the liberal intellectuals who buy into these things are still a minority. How do you reach those people that (international) culture doesn’t reach? I’m afraid the answer is to be found in politics. Britain needs to take a leaf out of the Dutch book and figure out how to reduce social inequality. One key factor in this might be to create a more egalitarian school system. Prioritise the teaching of foreign languages. Cultivate dialogue and exchange. Value happiness above success. Big ideas, which will require administration.

Learn or Play in the Summer Holidays?

11 Aug

11 August 2016

By Michele Hutchison

I remember being taken on one of the most boring summer holidays ever as a child: ‘Les Chateaux de la Loire’ it said in the brochure – the castles of the Loire Valley in France. I think we visited pretty much every one of the 140 chateaux. We were clocking up three or four a day, in any case. The countryside was dull, the Loire was monotonous and after a while, the castles became a blur. By week two, I was refusing to leave the back seat of the car, preferring to turn back to the first page of The Swiss Family Robinson and start reading the book all over again. My mum, who was a teacher, told me that I was missing out on a wonderful learning opportunity. ‘‘Think of all the poor working class children who didn’t have such opportunities and would go back to school in September with a learning gap’’, she said.

This was my first exposure to the idea of the ‘summer slide’ as it is now known. The ‘summer slide’ is supposed to occur when children are not intellectually stimulated during the long six week holiday and forget what they have learned. It sits uncomfortably with the notion that boredom is actually good for kids. Psychologists argue that boredom allows children to develop ‘internal stimulus’ which enables the development of creativity. Are working class kids more creative then, as a result? But the idea of free-ranging bored children in the summer holidays doesn’t chime with our (middle-class)compulsion to ‘consciously cultivate’ our kids in order to give them the best start in life. It is easier to take the safe path and provide structured education in the holidays.

These days in the UK, summer tutoring is practically the norm for middle-class families, especially those who can’t afford private education and try to make up the deficit this way. Many state schools are now offering enrichment lessons over the summer holidays and there are plenty of private companies offering high level courses like Debate Chamber. Some parents even send their kids on academic courses abroad. The idea of a ‘crammer’ is nothing new. It used to be a place to retake failed GCSEs or A levels or coach children for common entrance exams. The problem is that summer education risks becoming the norm for all children, raising the stakes, and making it even more impossible for less privileged children to keep up.

The crammer concept has now blown over to the Netherlands where Education Secretary, Sander Dekker, has announced plans to introduce summer schools in which children can work on subjects in which they have fallen behind. The Netherlands has a more egalitarian school system: there is no gaping chasm between rich and poor because everyone can attend the same good state schools. However, what they do have, which the UK doesn’t have – is children having to repeat a year if their results aren’t good enough. At primary school, this seems like a good idea – a proportion of young children aren’t ready to enter the learning stream at six years old and can hang back a year in nursery grade and play a bit more. There is no shame in this. Children who learn more slowly are given a chance to go at their own pace. Gifted children can move up through the classes more quickly.

At secondary school, however, having to repeat a year can be demotivating for the student. If the child could catch up on the subjects they failed during the summer, they could proceed to the next year. It makes sense and, of course, is cheaper for the government. But I hope the Netherlands sticks with the crammer concept and things don’t go too far down the road of increasing stakes and decreasing returns. Where are my own kids this week? My son’s on a surf camp on the island of Texel and my daughter’s on a mixed sports camp in Amsterdam. Personally, I think they’ll garner more useful life skills doing sports out in the fresh air than they would in an academic environment. What do you think? What are your kids doing this summer?

Author Archives: Michele Hutchison